


Clean Victory

by blacktail



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: M/M, Oikawa Tooru's Knee Injury, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-20 19:06:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30009537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blacktail/pseuds/blacktail
Summary: “I could have put up with it if it meant making you a champion, instead of analmost.”A personal volley during a training camp.
Relationships: Oikawa Tooru/Ushijima Wakatoshi
Comments: 2
Kudos: 30





	Clean Victory

**Author's Note:**

> This is a snapshot of a moment. Nothing is established or resolved.

The high-intensity training that forges the best athletes creates two feelings: A deep satisfaction that’s almost (or literally) aching, and the discomfort of sweat that makes everything stick in the worst ways. Wakatoshi’s hair is flat and plastered to his forehead from a run that lasted to the end of the day’s sweltering heat. His t-shirt hugs his back in a way tried to avoid by going up a size. The air was sticky before drills, before practice matches, before laps and before the run he took to put a cap on the training camp’s day. He and the weather have only grown muggier since.

Another shower is already running when he starts pulling clothes off, barely in the door before the feeling is too much and he needs to lose shirt to shoes, everything in-between. He grabs a towel from a locker and puts it over a peg outside the stall before cranking the water on. It’s cold whether he likes it or not and the ace only hears quiet humming a couple stalls down after his own hard intake of breath.

The water warms slightly and Ushijima stops panting like he’s run—well, he did just run five kilometers. The humming has stopped by then. He pops his head over the top of the stall, peeking past it as water falls through his slicked-back hair. Hard to tell with wet hair finger-combed up into a little mohawk but he doesn’t think it’s anyone from Shiratorizawa—

—then it isn’t hard to tell at all because sly, curious brown eyes peek right back at him over the partitions. They narrow when he doesn’t look away, though he doesn’t know if shower eye contact itself is the cause, or serving practice earlier. They weren’t gentle with each other on the court. Ushijima supposes there’s no reason for gentleness off, either, and doesn’t hold a look like that against Oikawa.

“It’s such a shame that Shiratorizawa doesn’t have to do more drills. You wouldn’t have to run off on your own.”

No, he didn’t think that silence would last long. He looks back just to meet Oikawa’s eyes again, the two inches of height making the difference between seeing over the dividers and only just being able to. People tend to feel looked down on and Ushijima wonders if Oikawa feels it too.

“We can practice dives at school. It isn’t what we’re here for,” Wakatoshi answers.

Ushijima counts the beats of silence after. He suspects frustration in them though he can’t see where the cause lies. With himself, he supposes. Or perhaps Oikawa’s own team.

“It’s what the rest of us are here for?” Oikawa quips back, all sarcasm, a moment too late. A dropped ball.

Maybe he’s frustrated with _himself_. He would be in good company. “If you wanted to win—”

“ _Don’t._ ” The other captain snaps a one-word order and Ushijima’s eyes narrow across the space.

He is not a spoiled boy. What he has he has through work, through the work of his parents. His academy requires brains to match skill and he had to train his mind as he trained his body. That said, Wakatoshi Ushijima is used to getting what he wants. The school he wants. The ranking he wants. The _team_ he wants. Meticulously crafted winning conditions.

He has wanted Oikawa Tōru, at different times and in different ways, for years. They have all blended together by now, given time and a fertile, young, fiery place to grow.

“You’re amazing.” He says so simply. Ushijima speaks plainly, his eyes on the tiled bathroom wall in front of him. He misses the way Oikawa’s eyes widen, how they lower out of sight. “You could be undefeated. You deserve to be undefeated.”

“And yet!”

“Nothing satisfies me more than beating you.”

“Yeah. _That._ And rubbing it in.”

Ushijima turns the water off. He’s more efficient and doesn’t loiter under the water. He grabs his towel, pulls it into the stall, and starts drying off. Oikawa, for his own reasons, turns the water off. Ushijima doesn’t remember another towel hanging on a stall.

“It feels good,” he admits, and the wet slap of Oikawa smacking the wall echoes in the locker room. “If you can’t join them, beat them.”

“You’re really hung up on that, aren’t you? Kind of weird, Ushiwaka.”

The snideness doesn’t sting. Not really. “If you say so.”

“You’re not the first person to get obsessed with me.” Right here, Ushijima doesn’t have to be looking at him to know the little _look_ Oikawa is giving him, flirty in the most condescending way possible. “And you won’t be the last!”

It isn’t an obsession. A yearning at best, maybe. _Coveting_ at most and maybe most accurately. Sometimes he tries to think about what it would be like living with this shitty banter all the time, listening to Oikawa talk himself up and dance in circles around those moments of deadly, focused, silent concentration. Could he put up with it? Could he have put up with it for years? He appreciates what Tendou brings to the team enough to get over it, and sometimes the talking fills the silence—

“Daydreaming about me, Ushiwaka-chan? Just mad because I’m right?”

The super ace wraps his towel around his waist and leaves his stall. Irritation grinds at the edges of his chest, the continual companion to an ache he’s come to live with. “I was trying to decide if I would have been able to put up with your mouth for three years.”

“So you _were_ daydreaming about me.”

Breathe

_in_

breathe

_out._

Ushijima finds his calm again and he looks back, meets Oikawa’s eyes over the edge of the shower stall. He can see a sort of satisfaction there that he doesn’t feel Oikawa has earned. A flare in his chest quietly burns away the desire for anything except for a clean and decisive victory:

“I could have put up with it if it meant making you a champion, instead of an _almost_.”

Well. No. He wouldn’t call that a _clean_ victory.

The next day is similar. Less muggy. Oikawa’s hair behaves itself, he whines less about the weather, Iwa-chan spends less time whining about him whining about the weather. Aobajōsai, and every other school there, works better with yesterday’s pressure lifted. The boys breathe easier. Tōru smiles, he laughs, and he turns his focus where it’s needed best.

_Slam._

Hs serves break through.

_Slam_.

The sound of ball-on-court sends a happy shiver through him every time, from the stinging in his hand straight to every nerve.

_Slam._

They grow like a forest, strong; like vines, together.

_SLAM._

The sound quakes through him. From center court his attention is pulled across the gym. The impact echoes around the walls in the quiet and he knows, he can feel it to his bones, up through his feet like he can feel his own points through his fingers, where _that_ ball came from. Wakatoshi walks back to the service area, intense.

Oikawa is caught staring. The intensity of the serve is still a live wire in Wakatoshi’s eyes, electric even on the other side of the gym.

“Hey shithead, eyes on _our_ game!”

The fine hairs on the captain’s arms stand on end. He tells himself it’s anticipation for the next play.

Ushijima feels like a god, young and invincible and still a year or two from peaking. He’s restless with the boredom of a camp even with the best in the prefecture. Guzzling from a water bottle he thinks about the Olympics, timing, years, playing on the world stage with all eyes--his father’s included--on him. He hits the shower alone, as late as the evening before, thinking of how far he can go. The patter of water and the sound of the door opening are both far-off with his objectives in mind. With an end goal clear enough he can forge any path.

“—a shame if you hurt yourself.”

One of the shower stalls closes. Oikawa doesn’t look at him over the divider. Ushijima is at a loss, stares across the divide until his fellow captain looks back.

“What?”

“I said, you should take it easy, it would be a shame if you hurt yourself.”

The words must have sounded less sincere the first time. “I won’t,” Ushijima comments with full certainty he doesn’t truly feel. There’s never any telling. People roll ankles walking down the street. He’s learned his father was prone to injuries. It all ends, just like that, unfair as life. What matters is the horribly annoyed sound Oikawa makes.

“That’s what I thought.” Oikawa stares ahead, brow aching with the effort of wanting to scowl and refusing to be bothered. He throws his head back instead to wash his hair, closes his eyes and works conditioner into it. He _feels_ Wakatoshi watch him. All of that focus honed in on him, intent on nothing more than working through the puzzle.

“You hurt yourself.” Oikawa is quiet in the face of what maybe sounded like a question, if only in Wakatoshi’s head. “Did you?”

“I don’t need any more of your pity.” Tōru tries to sound above it, unwanting, but he can’t help but love the concern in a hardened rival’s voice. (He does not acknowledge that the rivalry is one-sided.)

“It isn’t pity.” Ushijima leans on the edge of the stall, looking over it with a frown. “I don’t pity you. You weren’t taken to the hospital. It can’t be that bad.”

Oikawa turns this shade of red that Ushijima wasn’t expecting. He doesn’t realize it’s because of a swirl of conflicting and petulant emotions: Tōru doesn’t want pity, but he wants attention. He doesn’t want a big deal made of the way he twisted his knee but he wants to be recognized for it…and for not making a big deal of it. The line between boy and man is a blurry, ever-shifting one.

“It’s not that bad,” he agrees, in the end, aggressively rinsing the conditioner from his hair. When he looks up Wakatoshi hasn’t stopped watching him, and it occurs to him exactly _then_ that there are no clothes involved in this situation. Though to view they’re just heads and bare arms, there is more to the picture. Or less. It isn’t weird—it’s a locker room, showers, neither of them can claim not to have seen a whole lot more of his teammates than desired. He has to consider some non-pity reason for Wakatoshi to still be staring at him. Finding one really isn’t that hard. “Daydreaming about me again?”

“You said it isn’t that bad. Is it going to hurt your season?”

The direct question and total disregard for teasing make Oikawa bristle. Even with warm water and summer heat he catches a shiver and glares ahead at the shower door and its little latch. Without his glasses or contacts it’s all just a little blurry. “I don’t know yet.”

Ushijima turns away from him then. Oikawa bristles further, throws an arm over the top of the divider to point at him. “I know what you’re thinking—”

“No, you don’t.”

“—that I might not be able to play because of a stupid training camp—”

“That isn’t what I was thinking. That’s what _you_ were thinking.” Wakatoshi faces him, undaunted by the gesture that gradually falters. Petulance isn’t the word for that response, where Oikawa’s face scrunches up and he all but bares his teeth.

Supreme insult at someone else being right.

“I can still set with an injured knee.”

“You’re more than a setter to your team.” Ushijima turns off the water in his stall and grabs his towel, leaving Oikawa with an arm slung up over the divider and no way to argue that point without selling himself short. He hates that. He hates these _things_ that Ushijima just _says_. If it were malice Oikawa could meet him toe to toe. He knows how to handle insults and slights, and what’s more, how to return them right back over the net. Wakatoshi doesn’t insult him and, hell, Oikawa wishes he would. It would be better than the way the ace lets conflict roll off his shoulders like the drops he’s drying out of his hair and off of his broad chest, like none of it touches him.

“ _Obviously_.” Weak comeback. Chance ball. Oikawa turns and shuts off his own shower with a little more force than necessary. He remembered his towel this time and pulls it in to dry his hair out first. Ushijima is sorting through a locker and laying out clothes when Oikawa steps out half-blind, sore, trying not to limp.

Wakatoshi is a bird of prey, though. He zeroes in with narrowed eyes on the way Oikawa walks and there’s nothing to hide behind the Aobajōsai captain’s pride.

“You just can’t stop looking,” he shoots off, thinking that will definitely _definitely_ get Ushijima to do so. He’s wrong. Half-wrong, because their eyes meet just to let Oikawa know he’s looking away because putting underwear on while making full eye contact with another person would be unnecessarily uncomfortable for all parties involved. Wakatoshi seems no more stung or chided when he turns away than he was when Oikawa stepped out of the shower.

Tōru is the one that can’t stop looking. His dear, damned bastard Ushiwaka is form given to distilled athletics. He’s a sportsman in manner and body. Oikawa pulls his gym bag out of a locker just to keep from scratching the canvas that is Ushijima’s back laid bare.

“I have Ringl.”

“What?”

“For pain and swelling.”

“I said _what,_ not _for what_ , I know what ibuprofen is.”

“I also have Salonpas spray. A new roll of tape.” Without acceptance or denial he’s begun pulling these things from his bag: A roll of black elastic Kinesio tape, a small box of low-dose over-the-counter pills, and a tube of gel. One corner of his gym bag is, apparently, devoted to first aid, and Oikawa squints at the items laid out like an offering. His disbelief is met with flat sincerity that makes his heart pound with frustration or fascination at any given time.

Ushijima pops a Ringl tab into Oikawa’s begrudgingly offered hand and accepts the even more grudgingly offered thanks with grace. His eyes are high, around Tōru’s face instead of at his almost-abs or the line of his towel, and Oikawa realizes his hair is starting to curl in the humidity. He turns his back to reach for his brush and makes that a priority over clothes. Of course, Ushijima doesn’t just get up and leave. But he doesn’t get dressed, either. Oikawa closes the little metal locker door a bit too hard.

“ _What?_ ”

“Do you have a brace?”

“In my room!”

“Let me wrap your knee.” Sure enough, the roll of tape is in hand, held up for Oikawa’s inspection. Half of the suggestion catches him before the rest but he processes, eventually, the operative word ‘me.’ Wakatoshi offered to do it himself.

“Where would I be without you, Ushiwaka-chan? My knight in shining armor. I don’t know how to use tape and I had no idea how I was going to make it back to the dorm, it’s a good thing you’re here!” Oikawa laughs, and harder still, because that finally makes the ace frown up at him. It feels _good_ to look down at Ushijima for once, to fold his arms and judge and feel a little superior. The boy is usually a wall, an eagle, above it all, but Ushijima has never been good with people. Oikawa has fans, followers—Ushijima does too, but Oikawa actually enjoys knowing that girls fall over themselves for him and boys are jealous. Wakatoshi just accepts it as a fact tied to his awesome ability. He’s gotten used to whole crowds chanting his name. Schoolmates he doesn’t go out of his way to connect with. Not the way he goes out of his way to talk to Oikawa.

To shoot him down feels like a victory over him. The crease in his eyebrows is either frustration with who Oikawa is as a person—totally possible—or the sting of denial. The feeling is one-upping him, yes, but Oikawa finds it isn’t necessarily…a good feeling.

“Fine. Take care of yourself.” He sets the tape down on the bench and begins putting the rest back in his bag methodically. He grabs the shirt he laid out and pulls it on, a flush creeping up the back of his neck that Oikawa can only see because he’s squinting. 

_Take care of yourself_ , he said. Not _take care of it yourself._ A subtle but important difference that leaves Oikawa to determine, no. Maybe that doesn’t feel quite as good as he thought it would. When Wakatoshi has left, dressed and taken his things, the tape remains on the bench. Oikawa snatches it up and worries the end of it while he glares at the locker room door. The only thing he hates as much as a loss is a guilty win.


End file.
